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My Thoughts on Academia

04 Jan 2022 . category: thoughts . Comments
#neuro #academia

I successfully defended my Ph.D in early November 2021. Towards the end of the almost 3 hour ordeal, the question of my next steps came up, to which I responded along the lines of: “Even though my initial goal was to be a professor, I’ve come to have a few gripes about academia”. Immediately after, my committee had a few sarcastic comments and laughs about “how great academia is”. Here, I will share a few things that are not apparent to aspiring academics.

The Good

I had the priviledge of joining a well funded lab at a R1 institution, and my professor was very hands off. This is certainly not the case for all graduate students. In this environment, I had plenty of space and time to explore the academic landscape. My professor never questioned my decisions to attend conferences, hackathons, or even create a data science course for the graduate school. While everyone in the lab had deadlines to meet, nobody ever felt pressured to work overtime or be called upon at unreasonable hours. I was able to explore my own interests during my off time, pick up new hobbies, and even take a totally ridiculous trip to Antarctica on a whim with my family.

The graduate school offered a wide array of seminars to expand the perspective of students and faculties. My thesis work was focused on neuroimaging and network theories of brain activity, but there was no shortage of neuroscience seminars to keep me refreshed and curious about topics outside of my lab. I was also lucky enough to enroll in a collaborative institution with many like-minded students. Some times institutions push students to compete, students in the same classes do not get along, or labs are fearful of their work being “scooped” by another. I had no problems establishing good relationships with cordial professors or bonding with fellow students.

All that being said, out of my neuroscience class of nine students, only two are continuing in academia.

Pressure & Uncertainty

The uncertainties in funding apply to both student and faculty. Outside of R1 institutions, funding for researchers are not gauranteed yearly for full-time employees. Faculties are required to acquire grants to cover their own salaries outside of the teaching semesters.

The situation for Ph.D students is even worse, take the recent strike at Columbia University for example:

While endowments at big name universities grow larger, students are receiving salaries below a living wage. One of my friends was accepted to Columbia’s BioEngineering Ph.D program, and her offer letter specified a $31,000 salary for 9 months, requiring her to not only apply for highly competitive government grants, but also teach during the summer semesters to receive pay. In New York City, $31,000 before deductions for tax and health insurance is way below a living wage.

Also keep in mind that Ph.D candidates and Post-Doctoral researchers are mostly in their twenties and thirties, some with student debt, some trying to start a family.

For Ph.D students that decide to pursue opportunities in academia, they are immediately met with overwhelming uncertainty after their thesis defense. University position openings are scarce, people do not know where they will end up and have to risk uprooting their entire families to pursue a career. Take a former Post-Doc in my lab for example, he began his Post-Doc career in Seattle, moved to NYC to join my lab, followed us to UCSF right after his family moved to NYC because my professor wasn’t transparent about his plans. Then he interviewed for two hiring cycles across the country and finally found a position in Texas. How do you start a family without knowing where you will end up or whether your salaries will be consistent?

Mentoring

Most professors are not great project managers. Project managers are able to work with different types of teammates and keep the project running on a schedule with concrete deliverables. Professors on the other hand, have very different priorities in mind.

Towards the end of my Ph.D, I absolutely dreaded weekly lab journal clubs, because after any relevant work is presented, my professor always asked “how do we adopt this into our projects” or “can we just try this technique with one of our datasets”. While these questions are occasionally required for closely related works, moving the goal post of projects every week is absolutely insane. Any decent project manager knows the importance of setting and following project criterias, and any engineer can rant for hours about terribly managed projects that have no end goal in sight. I also believe that journal club is a place to share papers that are eye-opening and fun to talk about, weekly discussions about a papers strictly focused on specific projects do not engage lab members involved in different projects.

Of course, there are the professors that hold onto a project forever, refuse to complete the project in hopes of more findings to result in a higher impact publication. This is not so different from professors guilt tripping their graduate students from graduating because their work isn’t “fully complete”. Science is a never ending pursuit, even a full story being told is subject to adjustments when more is revealed. Additionally, underpaid graduate students need to move on with their lives!

I saw a huge difference in mentoring style and student experiences when comparing myself to others I’ve met at conferences and hackathons. I met professors that encouraged sharing, ensured their students learned useful skills applicable to job markets outside of academia, and had well documented lab manuals to ensure a smooth transfer of knowledge.

But students under my professor’s wings must already have a strong background in coding and math, and must be an indepdent worker. For example, a student from UCSF had to leave and join another lab two years into her Ph.D because my professor was so hands-off. My professor thought other students in the lab can get her up to speed, but everyone else is busy with their own projects and can only do so much! My professor like most others in academia, are trying to balance their family duties with acquiring funding, exhausting meetings, literature reviews, and institutional responsibilities. At brainhack events, I learned about different tools and practices for more efficient code sharing and review, and adapted most of the great practices into my work. I became so frustrated with new rotating students asking the same questions over and over that I wrote a lab manual hoping people would keep it updated after I leave. But most older professor won’t change their already established ways, or are too stressed about the next grant or publication to push for lab-wide adaptation of new practices.

Publishing

Right when I started outlining my thoughts for this post, Nature Neuroscience announced their new open access publishing fee of $12,000, which received massive backlash from academics:

If you are not familiar with the insanity of the academic publishing industry, have a read of this great Guardian article summarizing the profit driven backwards practices that are somehow accepted by academics. Or simply enjoy this tweets:

During my time at UCSF, the entire University of California school system decided to strike against Elsevier, one of the biggest publishers in academia. UC had to pay a yearly fee of about $11 million for subscriptions and publishing fees. And if you read over the Guardian article mentioned before, is a total scam.

Open access publishing not only promotes accessibility of tax payer funded scientific findings, it also increases transparency and sharing in scientific research. What’s the point of a scientific article if other researchers cannot build on top of it? Why are tax payers funding the NIH if they cannot access government funded science? Furthermore, what’s the point of a “high impact” paper if it’s dead upon publishing? Nobody reads it because it’s behind a paywall, the findings are not reproducible because the detailed methodologies and data are “available upon reasonable request”.

Then we have this news:

Why shouldn’t the NIH just push for open non-profit publishing anyways? Expose those publishers that lobby for cuts, expose the government officials accepting lobbying perks. Academics are so used to being punched down by institutions that they don’t realize they are the labor force driving the industry. These publishers do nothing other than typeset the figures and text researchers wrote, out of the projects researchers completed with their own funding, but yet the scientists have to pay to have it published?

Lastly, certain institutions are so immerse in the “publish or perish” culture of academia that they drive scientists to lose sight of the bigger pictures; Publications with jargons and convoluted language harms communication of knowledge. Students are pushed to work overtime on their experiments instead of exploring and enjoying the graduate school experience. Even animal species are subject to exploitive and extractive behavior.

There needs to be more conversation around experiments of “convenience” and a push for slower science. More importantly, academics need to organize and raise the working conditions across the board. What’s not discussed here are the barriers of entry and gatekeeprs in all stages of academia. The average age for an aspiring professor acquiring their first multi-year lab supporting grant is above 40 years old, and labs with existing grants are more likely to receive more funding. My Post Doc once said to me “academia is like a pyramid scheme”, and I’ve not looked at the established power structures the same ever since.

Me

Often compelled, sometimes high on coffee, very random attempts to blog like a hacker.